Embers & Ash

by T. M. Goeglein

  “Next to the Green Mill Lounge, across from Uptown National Bank,” he said. “Follow that tunnel and we’ll end up beneath the Troika of Outfit Influence.”

  “Where ultimate power is waiting,” I said quietly.

  It was one of those pause-before-you-leap moments, and Doug exhaled, staring around the room. “There hasn’t been anyone down here in a long time. The old telephone, that ticker-tape thingy . . . I wonder how it’s survived.”

  “The tunnel got cut off. It was forgotten,” I said, lifting the phone, hearing nothing. Knowing the Outfit as I did, I realized that the tunnels weren’t used only to flee the law, or one another; they were also ideal places to conduct dirty business in private. As counselor-at-large, I could only think how perfect this room was—beyond perfect—for a sit-down. I looked at the bar’s scarred surface and blew away a layer of grit, seeing hundreds of names, curses, and dates carved into the soft wood:

  Beware! Dominick DiBello is a gun-packing fellow, 1939

  Lefty Rosenthal marks cards and loads dice, the schmuck

  1952, Good for me, bad for you!—Jimmy “the Bomber” Cattura

  And finally, nearly obscured but still visible:

  NR, C-a-L, era qui

  “Nunzio Rispoli, Counselor-at-Large, was here,” I murmured, tracing the inscription with a finger. Doug was just inside the tunnel leading to the Riviera Theatre, moving a flashlight around. I started after him and hesitated—the pharaoh key chain was in one pocket, a pocketknife in the other. I took it out, returned to the bar, and began to scrape into the wood.

  “Sara Jane,” Doug said, “let’s go!”

  “On my way!” I said, staring at my handiwork, carved directly below Nunzio’s:

  SJR, C-a-L, was here.

  The mouth in the brick wall beckoned and I went to it. I glanced around the room once more, unsure if I’d ever pass this way again, and then the tunnel swallowed me up.

  9

  HEADED TOWARD THE RIVIERA THEATRE, TIME no longer slipped away. Instead, we tracked it by the minute, having calculated that the walk from the tunnel intersection to the Troika of Outfit Influence would take an hour. That, combined with our true north direction—GPS was useless underground but Doug had thought to bring a compass—meant that we were close to our destination.

  We traveled on, knowing we were close and saying little.

  A long descent had begun after we left the tunnel intersection and now the rotten perfume of human waste reemerged. The mossy brick walls, no longer concrete, told us that the branch of the sewer system we’d entered was very old; Doug reminded me that some of Chicago’s sewers had been in place for more than a hundred years. Just ahead came the sound of moving liquid—not the comforting rush of a clear stream but the spattering echo of something thick and noxious. Moving the beam through darkness, Doug said, “Whoa,” and raised an arm to stop me. He pointed the flashlight, and there it was—a waterfall of slimy waste spilling from a trio of pipes at the top of a high concrete wall. The brick floor of the tunnel ended a few feet in front of us; a twelve-foot abyss floated between it and the waterfall. We squinted into the stinking drop-off, unable to see the bottom. “Perfect,” Doug said, “dead end.”

  “You’re right. Too perfect,” I said quietly. “It reminds me of an Outfit guy, Bones something . . . Bones Caputo.”

  “Quite a moniker,” Doug said.

  “He goes around with this monstrous pit bull on a chain, Goliath. The dog’s like a walking, snarling shark,” I said. “Months ago, I presided over a sit-down between Bones and his partner. They’re bank robbers, hitting small neighborhood branches for a couple grand at a time. The partner suspected Bones was holding out, not giving him his fair cut. After a dose of cold fury, Bones confessed that he’d hidden the money. Guess where.”

  “Kind of obvious, isn’t it? In Goliath’s doghouse.”

  “You’d think so. But no . . . Bones is dumb, not stupid,” I said. “He’d been wrapping the cash in garbage bags and burying it in this disgusting hole in his backyard where he’d trained the dog to, you know . . . do his business.”

  “Ugh . . . where no one in his right mind would look.”

  “It’s Outfit mentality,” I said, staring at the waterfall. “Hide something valuable where there appears to be nothing but a repulsive wall of shit.”

  “You think ultimate power’s behind that wall?”

  I nodded, staring at the pipes spewing out gunk. “Nothing up there but concrete. There’s got to be a tunnel or a door at the bottom,” I said, looking into the pit. “No ladder. No footholds. Okay, grappling hook it is.”

  “We’re going down there? Into that?”

  “Not we. Me,” I said. “Attach it to something sturdy and lower me down.”

  “For once, I won’t argue . . . Be my guest,” he said, uncoiling the rope and hooking it to a nearby pipe.

  “If I’m wrong and there’s no entrance—”

  “Then I’ll hose you down and shoot you full of penicillin,” he said, “and we’ll find another way inside.”

  I looped the rope around my waist. “Hold on tight.”

  “Hold your nose.”

  Doug lowered me by inches until I could see what waited beneath. The waterfall emptied into a circular pool equipped with some type of gurgling pump, like a giant bowl of gross butterscotch pudding. I touched down on a walkway that wound around the pool, leading to a door. “I found it!” I said, pulling it open, hearing a low rumble, and then—

  Ka-thump!

  —I went down on my hands and knees as Poor Kevin, in his filthy ski mask and greasy plaid suit, leaped from a shadow and punched me in the head so hard, and—

  Ka-thump! Ka-thump!

  —I was kicked once, twice in the skull and rolled on my back to see Teardrop, its glowing red eyes cutting through the murkiness, as—

  Ka-thump!

  —Goatee dropped his boot squarely on my face, grinning with the same evil smirk as the devil tattooed on his chin, until—

  “Sara Jane!”

  I blinked up at my parents and Lou hovering over me, staring silently, not underground but in our living room, which was as violently trashed as the night they’d disappeared. A family portrait made creepy-clownish by our grinning naïveté clung to the mantel, slashed to ribbons. Cabinets were kicked in like mouths full of broken teeth, shelves splintered, the bust of Frank Sinatra shattered to pieces. The couch I lay on was gutted, with its cottony intestines spilled across the floor. I tried to sit up but a hand eased me back to the lacerated cushions, which were cold and sticky beneath my head. I turned from my dad to my mom to Lou, their eyes riveted on me in a troublesome, anxious way.

  “See?” I said, “I kept going, kept looking. I’m almost there.”

  Quietly, nearly inaudibly, my mother said, “We are alive . . .”

  “Thank . . . god,” I croaked.

  “In Sara Jane,” she hissed.

  “Each day we wait . . . ,” Lou said, taking a slow, threatening step.

  “For Sara Jane,” my dad continued with a blade of contempt in his words. He yanked me toward him, his voice rising as my mom and brother joined in, chanting, “Our daughter, our sister,” pausing to spit, “our savior . . . Sara Jane.” And then my dad did something he’d never done in my life: he raised an open hand and slapped me so sharp and fast across the cheek that I froze, squeezing my eyes shut—

  “Sara Jane!”

  —and fluttering them open to Doug, his face tight with anxiety. I was on my back just outside the doorway and he was leaning over me, hands pressed together. “Sorry I hit you,” he said, “but I was scared you were dead.”

  “I’m . . . alive?”

  “Luck of the Sicilians, I guess,” he said, nodding inside the door, where a pile of brick and stone lay. “Part of the ceiling in there collapsed when you opened the
door.”

  “I heard it,” I said, struggling to sit up as the universe did a jackknife and a mule kicked me in the head. Pain reverberated through my skull like a controlled explosion. I leaned over, heaved bile, wiped my mouth with a shaky hand, and touched at the cuts and abrasions on my bare head. “Where’s my helmet?” I wheezed.

  “In pieces. If you hadn’t been wearing it, I could’ve slapped you around all day and you’d still be lying there, forever,” he said. “Something hit you hard enough to knock you back outside the door. It sounded like the rest of the bricks and stuff came barreling down seconds later. If it had all fallen at once, you’d be a pancake . . . no, a crepe . . . a crepe run over by a steamroller hit by a—”

  “Got it,” I said, hawking blood and recalling a blip from my fever dream. “I saw them,” I murmured.

  “Who? Your family?”

  “Yeah. They’re angry at me, losing patience,” I said, feeling the trail of a tear. “If I don’t save them soon, they could . . . all of them will—”

  “Sara Jane,” he said, touching my shoulder, “you just got hit on the head with something very heavy. This one time, maybe give yourself a break, okay?”

  I looked into the tunnel behind the door, and back at him. “We can climb over that stuff, but it might happen again. If you want to stay behind—”

  “I just rappelled into a crap-filled pit,” he said. “If I was going to bail, it would’ve happened by now.” He pointed a flashlight and we climbed over the debris, careful not to touch a wall or brush the ceiling. The floor was powdery, the air stale and unmoving. The tunnel curved and ended at a ladder descending into gloom. We exchanged a glance and then began to climb down, first one rung, then another, Doug saying, “Relax. It’ll hold. The law of averages says—”

  And then the ladder collapsed beneath us.

  The thing about free-falling is that it’s too late to scream.

  Your nervy stomach lurches at not being attached to the world any longer and your brain goes into turtle shell–protective mode. It’s only when you land on something that’s not soft, but that also doesn’t kill you, that you’re able to emit an oh-my-god-I’m-not-dead! sound. Mine was guttural—a raccoon backed over by an SUV—while Doug’s was shrill and surprised, like an elderly nun hit with a water balloon.

  I was able to speak first, saying, “Goddamn . . . ladders.”

  “What are we lying in?” Doug groaned. “Please don’t say sewage.”

  I stood on the pile of stinking, caked dirt that had broken our fall. Pure circumstance had dropped us near an ancient industrial light switch mounted on the wall. Stumbling toward it, seeing its rusty tubing snake toward the surface, I flipped the handle to ON. First came an anemic buzz and then three of a dozen large, suspended lights hummed to life. I looked up at the mouth of the tunnel, high upon the wall from which we’d fallen; remnants of the ladder clung to it and the rest lay in pieces around us.

  I turned slowly, staring at a vast, triangular room.

  “It’s, like, the size of an airplane hangar,” Doug said in awe, “but V shaped.”

  I stared at the three soaring walls and said, “Those must be the foundations of the troika—the buildings that hold the Riviera Theatre, Green Mill, and the bank.”

  “Which one is which?” he said.

  I shrugged, brushing a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “I can’t tell. But we’re in a big, hidden pocket beneath them.” The only entrance and exit seemed to have been via the collapsed ladder, and its tunnel and doorway had been craftily concealed behind the disgusting waterfall—this place was not meant to be stumbled upon by random Outfit members traversing the tunnels. It gave me pause, as I wondered exactly how we were going to get out of here, and I stared around the room. Joe Little had fashioned it from a landscape of brick and concrete, leaving a floor of hard-packed soil. Piles of dirt like the one we’d landed on had been pushed into corners to accommodate—

  I spotted it, and gasped a little, elbowing Doug.

  —a rounded structure built from white bricks, like an oversized igloo, crouching in the middle of the room.

  “Is it possible?” Doug said. “Could it be . . . ?”

  “The last chapter of the notebook,” I said slowly. “Volta. I think it’s a vault.”

  “If so, it’s a big one,” he said, following me toward it. A pathway hugged the structure’s exterior, and as we looked for the entrance, we passed by a hulking, rusty metal box the size of a refrigerator bolted to the wall. It had a sign with a flaking image of zigzagging electricity and a warning:

  CAUTION! HIGH VOLTAGE! DO NOT TOUCH!

  “You think that old thing’s still functional after all these years?” Doug said.

  “Let’s don’t find out,” I said, continuing around the vault to a green brass door held fast with thick hinges, studded with bolts. It took only seconds to rub away decades of tarnish, revealing numerals and letters etched into brass: U.N.B. 001, and the year 1932. “Vault number one,” I said, “or at least the number one most important vault. All it takes is a key.” The chain came easily from my neck and I leaned toward the doorknob. I looked again, felt around it, and turned to Doug. “There’s no keyhole.”

  “There has to be,” he said, edging past. Bending, squinting, touching, he stood back finally, confused. “There’s no keyhole.”

  “Then what’s the key for? Why does it have U.N.B. 001 on it?”

  He shrugged, staring at the door. “You think maybe it’s . . . unlocked?”

  I stared at him, saying nothing, unable to believe that anything so simple could be possible. Like cracking a safe, moving my fingers with precision, I gently turned the knob. A loud click! made us both jump.

  The door opened a few inches, creaking on dry hinges.

  Now all we had to do was step through.

  10

  A FEEBLE GLOW EMANATED FROM THE VAULT— the switch had activated its lights, too—and I pushed into a room that was completely empty.

  Except for a dramatically thin guy sitting with his legs crossed, waiting.

  I scream-jumped and then caught myself, focusing on the first mummy I’d ever seen in person.

  Doug and I edged inside, and he propped the door wide open, whispering, “If that thing moves, I’m outta here, fast.” For a minute or two, or maybe ten, we stood staring at the dead human being, while absorbing the barrenness of the vault. Doug spoke first, saying, “There’s nothing here except him. Where’s ultimate power?”

  “Maybe he knows,” I said.

  We crossed slowly to where the desiccated body sat next to a table holding a dusty glass, a whiskey bottle, and an ancient cigar. It wore a plain blue suit and dull brown tie, moldy with age. What grabbed my attention, though, was its snap-brim fedora and a diamond-encrusted ring hanging lazily from its shriveled pinkie. Even with every trace of life long evacuated, its posture exuded a haughty, intimidating presence. I stared at the leathery flesh clinging stubbornly to its face, marked by jagged scars on the left side. The thing leered with its lips stretched back, and I felt a chilly whisper of recognition. “Holy shit,” I said. “Nunzio found ultimate power all right.”

  “What?” he said, looking around the empty space. “Where?”

  “Remember? The one with lasting influence on the Outfit?”

  “Wait, you don’t mean—” he said, staring at the gristly skin that had been disfigured by a sharp knife long ago. “Oh. Oh . . . god . . .”

  “Close, in terms of veneration by mobsters,” I said, nodding at the mummy. “Al Capone. Scarface Al himself. Mister Ultimate Power, in the flesh, or what’s left of it.”

  “The cold air down here preserved it, kept him from becoming a complete skeleton,” Doug said, gaping at the body. “Can I . . . should I make sure it’s him?”

  “He won’t complain.”

  Riffling through his pockets
with careful fingertips, Doug extracted a snub-nosed .38 revolver, followed by a fat billfold. He flipped it open and said, “Driver’s license name . . . Al Brown.”

  “His go-to alias. Used it for years, according to the notebook.”

  “This thing was issued in 1951. Every history book on the control center says he died in 1947, in Florida. It was a closed casket, no one saw the body,” he said with a smirk. “That’s because there was no body. I guess the rumor was true.”

  “Faked his death and escaped the Feds and the Outfit alike with a hundred million dollars in cash,” I said. “There’s a scrap of a newspaper article taped in the notebook, some old cop swearing he saw Capone in Chicago, alive, with Joe Little—”

  “In 1951,” Doug said.

  We faced each other then, my friend and I who had been through so much together, not only on (and beneath) the streets of Chicago, but hacking like jungle explorers through the notebook, untangling its secrets, memorizing its facts. Combining truth with what-ifs, I began enunciating a theory. “Joe Little built the vault for Capone so he could hide a hundred million dollars before he went to prison . . .”

  “And then four years after faking his death, when he thought the coast was clear, he snuck back to Chicago to make sure it was safe,” Doug said.

  “Or to make a withdrawal?”

  “But it was dangerous,” he said. “If the Outfit hierarchy discovered that Capone had hidden a fortune from them, they would’ve been pissed. After all, he wasn’t boss anymore in 1951.”

  “He needed someone with real influence to negotiate a settlement so they wouldn’t snuff him for the cash. The counselor-at-large,” I said. “He needed Nunzio.” I glanced at the diamond pinkie ring and flashy fedora. “Capone was a showboat. A braggart. It fits that he would’ve brought Nunzio down here to show off his stash.”

  “Which is how Nunzio learned about the vault,” Doug said.